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18 Things You Should Consider before Launching an E-commerce Site

There are plenty of things or aspects that can affect the performance in ecommerce business, but some handful of leading aspects can give guaranteed results. Here we have listed 18 such considerations to improve your ecommerce campaign before making it a reality.

Launching brick-and-mortar store involves rigorous efforts at pre-launch, launch, and post-launch stages. The same goes true for the modern ecommerce storefront launch.

In a broad sense, online storefront owner or a company has to pass through following phases and answer the respective questions on each stage.

1. Selection of Products/Services

When we look at the selling figures of other ecommerce stores obtained by our private circles, we tempt to mimic the same business with similar products or services in our geography or another.

In fact, it is fatal to go that way. Instead, we have to run thorough research to find out actual needs in the market for unique product or services. If you already have brick business with products/services, you simply go online with it. Otherwise, tons of business ideas are floating around the web; you can follow with some regional tweaks.

For instance, we take an example business of supplying flowers as gifts (Gift Shop) in your town, by taking online orders from the relatives or friends of recipients. You can do it at a charge and with doorstep supply and appropriate presentations according to the occasion.

This one seems to be a unique idea and likely one.

2. Target Audience Research/Know Your Consumers

Once you find out what you want to sell, you should have in mind, to whom do you want to sell it. You should know,

Which computing devices they use

What are their buying preferences?

What is their demography?

What is geography?

What is culture?

Once you have all answers, you can plan your ecommerce business strategies accordingly.

In our example business, the target audience would be outside relatives or friends of the citizens living in your town. Their demography and geography may vary according to the occasions.

3. How Much To Sell / How Much to Invest

Once you have decided the products or services to offer online and you know your target audience, you have to estimate the buying capacities of your prospective customers/visitors. If it is a regionally targeted business, you can compute it easily with local data available on trade centers or other industry sources.

However, it becomes challenging when you think of globally or in untraversed territories. Therefore, you should run competitor survey using various ecommerce tools as well as use confidential resources to know how much they sell and how much we need to invest in ecommerce business.

Thus, you can arrange financial resources accordingly as well as register your business based on the investment and future expansion planning. For instance, you can register as Sole Proprietor, Partnership, LLC, or Corporation.

4. Who Competitors Are? What are They Doing?

As mentioned before, competitor surveys are highly beneficial to know the market realities. Based on thorough competitor analysis, you can formulate your business strategies for business processes, production/purchase, marketing/selling, and financial planning.

5. Where to Stock – Inventory Management/Stock Tracking

If you have digital goods or services that hardly require anything to store, you are free from the warehouse, inventory storage, inventory management, and stock tracking worries or exercises.

There are third party software and several inbuilt features in leading ecommerce platforms to do inventory management efficiently so think of it to integrate it in your ecommerce portal.

Stock tracking may help you to save your shoppers from frustrations when they realize that the product is out of stock at the end of checkout process.

6. How to Take Order / Order Tracking

Just like inventory management, order tracking software is trendy in ecommerce landscape. Your customers can track the status of their orders once it is fixed. They can cancel or modify orders at certain stages of shipping.

For an ecommerce business, software available to handle orders and relevant procedure like shooting emails accordingly and automatically. If you integrate order tracking with shipping management, you can save spending on human resources to do several things manually and can provide real-time order status as well as shipping status in your ecommerce modules.

Several products need special packaging for specific orders also based on the geographies of the recipients.

7. How to Ship –Shipping Management

Ecommerce vendors have to tie with various shipping services regionally and internationally to meet diverse needs of shipping according to the products/goods to deliver.

Most of the ecommerce platform offers shipping calculators or developers can integrate the best one to confer the shipping rates before producing a final invoice for payment. Thus, online shoppers can know the real price of the product when it arrives at doorsteps.

With the integration of order tracking software, you can track shipping status and prospective dates of arrivals.

8. How to Manage Returns

The biggest hindrance of ecommerce is it is devoid of real product touch so you cannot find out whether it is perfect for you or not and it happens when it arrives actually at your door after payment.

Therefore, reputed ecommerce vendors always offer return options with required flexibility and precautions. Thus, honest customers can return unwanted goods immediately and get either replacements or money return if replacement is not possible.

You have to introduce return policies and create modules during the ecommerce designing and programming process.

9. Monetization –What is Price/Profit/Budget

Once you set up the entire planning of ecommerce, you need to count the price tags for your products or services based on the investment, ongoing expenditure, ecommerce site development cost, maintenance of the site, and your profit to sustain the further growth of the business.

Frequent changes in prices, as well as mimicking price slots of your competitors, may not give your ecommerce a required boost in the long run so do endeavors to come with own pricing policies.

Ecommerce Development

Once you set up the ecommerce concept and the entire process mechanism, it is time to think of ecommerce website or web portal to realize the planning and efforts you have made in the form of a live and interactive ecommerce storefront running on the web.

In due course, you have to pass through following steps of ecommerce development and running the site on the Internet.

10. Selection of Domain Name & Business Registrationt

Each business has a unique identity as its name so your ecommerce business should have a name that reflects its purpose and offers branding opportunities. Of course, registration of the business name is essential by following the laws of lands.

Based on the unique business name, you can register a domain name for online identity. If you are only with online business without any brick-and-mortar identity, you must select unique domain name as you do with real world business.

Just like real world business, you must go to obtain EIN (Employer Identification Number) to open a business bank account and fill up taxation requirements by securing social security number like things.

It is an essential step when verification process goes for payment gateway integration and international currency exchanges.

11. Selection of Ecommerce Technologies

It is vital a step; you may not able to select appropriate ecommerce platform without the help of experts, so it is better to carry this procedure after the next phase of selection of your ecommerce development team or company.

For the sake of information, today myriads of ecommerce platforms are running on the web to solve different purposes for various businesses. Among them, PHP open source with CMS capabilities are trendier, and Magento is ranking on the top beside WooCommerce, VirtueMart, and Ubercart.

The selection of technology may decide hosting requirements, hence the selection of hosting services.

12. Selection of Development Team

The topmost aspect determines the success of ecommerce. Right talent, expertise, and skill have a distinguished role in right product development. Therefore, you must carefully select ecommerce team of designers, programmers, QA professionals, UX designers, and marketers by applying appropriate filters.

Check portfolio, testimonials, cross-references, social media, and reviews on the Internet to determine the capable team for you. Rates are afterthoughts because quality never comes with the cheapest so you must ready to pay worth the quality you receive at the end.

13. Selection of Marketing Team and Strategies

If you have a decent online storefront with awesome products, but nobody has an idea of it, who will buy it all? In this age of competition, you should apply all possible Internet marketing techniques and tweaks cost-effective ways.

14. Designing

Each ecommerce website demands unique designing approaches because each product is unique. Therefore, you and your designing team should run a thorough search on the web to find the best examples to follow or apply your creativity from the scratch solutions.

Your prior research and deep interest in interactive prototyping may yield expected outcomes at the end.

15. Programming

The best coding practices and following high standards of programming can give high quality ecommerce portal where UX and usability are at the core.

Seamless integration of external services and third party software are a priority for ecommerce programmers. You should focus on SEO, performance optimization, and conversion optimization while creating functional ecommerce storefront.

Regional and international payment gateway integration with hassle-free checkout process are the demand of the day. Advanced search features and personalization technologies are trendy and contribute significantly to the success of most of the ecommerce sites.

Therefore, you need an excellent team of programmers with advanced ecommerce technologies, tools, and techniques knowledge as well as experiences. Perhaps Perception System can give you perfect answer by its excellent team of ecommerce programmers.

16. Testing

Testing begins with the beginning of the ecommerce development process, and each step needs some sorts of testing and quality assurance procedure. Therefore, you need to have highly qualified and experienced testers and QA professional to decide and implement right testing strategies and QA techniques.

The bug-free product is the first condition for excellent UX so check your testing team has all required arsenals like simulators and real computing devices including smartphones and tablets of all mobile platforms with different OS versions.

Touch gestures require special testing efforts with real users in UX testing so create and furnish right environment.

17. Deployment

For high-performance ecommerce store, selection of right hosting is crucial. If you have scores of transactions involved in the operation of your online store, and your database has to accumulate or exchange sensitive, and private info, dedicated hosting or private cloud hosting are preferable options.

Use of encryption technologies and certificates may create trusts among the shoppers so ask your hosting providers for competitive rates.

18. Support/Maintenance/Upgrades

To build good rapports and efficient branding, excellent supports, maintenance, and updates are certain factors. Your reputation building processes on the web and social media only can response when you have comprehensive and pleasing support services for the website experiences as well as products/services related experiences.

If you signup regular maintenance contracts with right providers and follow regular software updates, product updates, and technology upgrades, you may surely win the battle of online business.

Conclusion:

Ecommerce launching cannot differ from brick store launch process. You have to pass through all steps just keeping online mode in your mind. When a startup or a brick store owner thinks online selling, she has to take care of each aspect of the business before jumping on ecommerce website development.

Careful planning and designing for the excellent user experiences, usability, site performance, and site optimization can yield great rewards in the long run. Of course, the intensive help of expert ecommerce developers can make big differences in the quality as well as the cost of the development.

Therefore, leading brands and reputed businesses prefer Perception System and its ecommerce development team as their online store development partner.

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